PASS Summit 2013 Report #8

I think the PASS water bottles are the most useful thing we’ve got as attendees in a while – using mine now.

Glenn Berry commented on Twitter that they don’t have clients on stage this year, just referenced. Very nice change.

Video about managing data in Barcelona. Flashy, fun even, not very useful (the video that is). Lead-in to talking about ‘insights’. Obvious to this audience maybe, but probably not to all.

35 TB of Skype data per day. I’ll admit that is a lot. Nice dig about Power something being meant for business users got applause – letting users figure out the joins usually means pain. JSON data – poor XML, where did you go? Doesn’t seem too hard to pull in Hadoop data and combine with other data, which doesn’t mean I could pass the quiz if someone asked me to do it right now. Having some fun talking about Apple and Android. I think perhaps the most fun I’ve seen in a MS presentation…ever? Good!

Stuff from press release today:

Customers such as Edgenet, SBI Liquidity Market and TPP are already pushing the boundaries of in-memory performance by deploying SQL Server 2014. You can find more information about both customers by reviewing their case studies: Edgenet, SBI Liquidity Market and TPP.

SQL Server Backup for Windows Azure Tool whichsupports encrypted and compressed backups to Windows Azure for previous versions of SQL Server. A preview of the tool will be available this week for customers to download from the SQL Server 2014 CTP2 website.

Emphasis on visualization. I wish I was good at this. It’s easily the most important part of reporting, show the data in a way that helps the user understand the story the data has to tell. I don’t know enough about it to know how good the tools are, but they seem to be getting better.

Tim Mitchell mentioned coffee and now it’s hard to focus. Would it be over the top to ask for someone to bring me a cup (Decaf, two splenda, light cream)?